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I finally cracked my grandma's pie crust after 4 failed tries
Her recipe just says 'add flour until it feels right' which is impossible to follow. Turns out I was using way too much water and overworking the dough in my kitchen in Phoenix where it's dry. Took me making 5 pies in 4 weeks but I finally got that flaky texture she always had. Anyone else have a family recipe that leaves out a key step like this?
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adamthompson1d ago
That dry climate is such a hidden problem in recipes from other places. Grandma probably wrote that recipe in a humid Midwest kitchen where the dough felt different by default. You basically had to reverse-engineer the whole thing just because of where you live. Five pies in four weeks sounds like a lot of work but you cracked it. I bet half the battle with those old recipes is just figuring out what "feels right" actually means in your own kitchen. Now you probably know that dough better than anyone who just follows a modern recipe verbatim.
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the_anthony1d ago
Ngl @adamthompson I gotta push back a little. That "feels right" stuff is exactly why I had to make five pies. Grandma's recipe was already good for her kitchen, but the whole point of baking is adapting, not guessing. You cracked it with trial and error, not some vague intuition.
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shanelee1d ago
Really feel for you @the_anthony, putting in that kind of work over a month just to nail down one recipe. I've been there with my mother's cornbread recipe and our high altitude here. It took me six tries to figure out that the liquid measurements were all off because of the dry air. You had to basically rebuild the dough from scratch, and that's no small thing.
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